The monitoring equipment is designed to act as an in-service monitor to provide real-time analytics into optical transport infrastructures. In a major operation, the town of Apex, North Carolina, U.S. has the monitoring system installed to provide information for the entire area.
With the Apex project the ADVA sets out to give network assurance, such as enabling fiber breaks to be rapidly repaired with minimal disruption. The real-time monitoring system allows any issues to be identified within seconds. When such events occur, technicians can be instantly dispatched. This saves the municipality time, lowers costs and ensues that important public services, such as police and fire departments, together with key utilities such as water facilities are monitored.
Commenting on the upgrade of the town’s monitoring and control systems, Erika Sacco, who is the director, IT/GIS, Apex, said: “Essential public amenities depend on rapid reporting and information exchange. For services like policing, firefighting and wastewater management, reliable, high-speed connections could not be more critical. That’s why we’re leveraging the assurance of ADVA Optical Networking’s ALM fiber monitoring solution.”
He went onto emphasize the importance of monitoring: “Fiber is only as useful as it is available; being alerted to any damage in real time enables us to take action even before a break happens. That means excellent service availability and major budget savings.”
There is also a green element to the proposal, where Sacco adds: “What’s more, it makes our processes far more environmentally friendly. We’re currently monitoring six key fiber pairs and will be including ten more locations before the end of 2017. Over the next few years, we’ll expand the scope even further and the advantages will increase.”
The video below shows more detail about the set-up and operation:
The network monitoring is non-intrusive and it functions independently of transported data streams. This was an essential part of the core design and in-built into the installation. For the installation of the ADVA Optical Networking solution, this task was performed by a second company, M2 Optics.
As a further factor, the system makes use of an intuitive GUI. This interface allows technicians to pinpoint faults or parts of the system that are showing degradation. This use of visual indicators additionally helps to avoid false alarms, which are costly and unproductive.
